Tuesday, November 29, 2011

A Mind for a Mop

To suggest that children benefit from having a full-time parent – which will usually be the mother – is, in the eyes of the dominant intellectual culture, equivalent to advocating suppression of women and "swapping their brains for a mop." . . .Being a full-time homemaker, mother and wife is the left's vision of hell.

Why that is so is not my subject here. Rather, I seek to refute the idea that full-time homemaking is intellectually vapid and a waste of a college education.

Let me first state that I have no argument with those mothers who need to or even just wish to work outside the home. My argument is with those who believe that staying at home is necessarily mind-numbing.

Nor do I wish to romanticize child rearing. As a rule, little children don't contribute much to the intellectual life of a parent (although older children who are intellectually curious can spur a parent to seek answers to challenging questions they may not have considered before). Any intellectually alive woman who is a full-time mother must therefore find intellectual stimulation elsewhere.

The point is that she can find such stimulation without leaving her house. Furthermore, the intellectual input she can find is likely to be greater than most women (or men) find working outside the home. . . .

Let me give an example of the woman I know best: my wife. She is a non-practicing lawyer with a particular interest in and knowledge of taxation and the economy. She decided to stay home to be a full-time mother to her two boys (one of whom is autistic) and her two nieces (who lost their mother, my wife's sister, to cancer, when they were very young). Between talk radio, History Channel documentaries, BookTV on C-SPAN2, recorded lectures from The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, and constant reading, she has led a first-class intellectual life while shuttling kids, folding laundry and making family dinners.

So it is not only nonsense that full-time homemaking means swapping the mind for a mop. It is also nonsense that the vast majority of paid work outside the home develops the mind. One may prefer to work outside the home for many reasons: a need or desire for extra income; a need to get out of the house; a need to be admired for work beyond making a home; a need for regular interaction with other adults. But the development of the intellect is not necessarily among them.

This makes me kind of feel like some elitist since I do have and take the opportunity to stay home. Well, at least it makes me feel better that I CAN make staying home an intellectual persuit -- and I try -- I guess I just can't get enough of it, though.

Contrast this to caregiver burnout, which does happen when you're caring for everyone else all the time ("Tired mom? You might need more than a nap to combat that fatigue" by Teri Harman, Deseret News).

2 comments:

I love being a homemaker. If I had the option, I wouldn't work for a living. I would only work at home. Granted, I do have a job working in my home, but if given the opportunity, I'd quit my job and only take care of my own child. She's had to share her toys, me and our home for her whole little life and I wish she could've had some time with just her and I before having to start school next fall. Although, she is well socialized because of the daycare. There are pros to both ways.

About this Blog

At this point in my life I feel that if I take much time for myself, my family will fall apart. I can hardly get 30 seconds of thought in, so 60 minutes of writing would kill things. So, I'm still around, but blogging only occasionally.

Background: This blog has been a lot of things, but mostly it's my online filing cabinet of cool stuff. The main topic is typically women and our divine role and that we are lionesses who protect our families. Sometimes, though, I get off on other tangents, too. If Pinterest had been around a few years ago, I probably could have stored these little gems there. LATG is a bit of a journal, too, and I love seeing how I've grown (hopefully) and changed over the past few years.